Let’s face it, today’s consumers are skeptical. Can you blame them? With all the marketing hype and sales pitches people receive each day, we are all a bit jaded. However, to make the sale we must overcome our prospect’s natural skepticism and create a relationship of trust. One of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal is customer testimonials.
Testimonials are a strong motivator. They help prospects see the power and benefit of doing business with you. Because they’re provided by an outside source, they’re perceived as unbiased and therefore carry more weight than sales copy.
Vera Raposo describes how testimonials can be used to benefit your business in her post here.
Testimonials are powerful. They create believability, credibility, and a sense of security for your customer. They help to break down the natural barriers and distrust that most buyers feel towards you or your business. Watch any infomercial and you will see that they are loaded with customer testimonials. Why? Because they work!
An extra bonus is that testimonials will also create more loyalty in your customers. Once people have put their name and reputation on the line by publicly endorsing a product or service (or person), they will stand behind that decision even if they find out it’s a bad one.
We have been encouraging our clients to use testimonials in more than one ways to help their products or services help generate credibility and authority.
Testimonials are a powerful tool in helping you to break down your prospects skepticism and fear. So go on and urge your customers to give you testimonials about your business. You can’t have enough customer testimonials.
One of my articles, Is your marketing really working for you?, was published in a newsletter of our client, Softlink Logistic Systems.
Businesses spend in a variety of ways in order to attract potential customers. These expenses are made with a view to generating enquiries, closing deals, and growing business. However, most of us do not know whether a particular marketing investment is really achieving these objectives, as we usually do not have any way to measure or track effectiveness.
Using a common sense approach, and sound systems, you can move your company towards a culture of really knowing what works in marketing, and allocating your budgets there.
Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? A new survey by Directions Research, Inc. commissioned by Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.
The research suggests several trends:
The leap in new technology options and the shifting demographics of the workforce mean that the old, traditional way of doing business is rapidly being enhanced by new ways of working. More business will be conducted using emerging communications technologies and social networking platforms.
Technologies that people prefer to use in their private lives will become the technologies people want to use at work.
The younger generation prefers to use multiple channels of communication, often choosing social networks, text messaging or instant messaging instead of e-mail and in-person meetings. This shift could lead to increased support for work technologies that offer these capabilities.
The survey was conducted by Directions Research via Internet in late February 2009. Roughly 90 percent of the respondents were white-collar-workers. College students account for 10 percent of the survey. Survey responses were divided equally between men and women.
Key Findings:
While email is still the leading technology tool of choice, usage of text messaging, instant messaging, social networking and online productivity tools are on the rise with white-collar workers under 35, with nearly one in three reporting they use these technologies at work daily.
50 percent of technology “leaders” would choose text messaging or instant messaging if they could have only one technology for a month for personal use.
In the next five years, white-collar workers plan to increase their time working remotely by 50 percent, resulting in average white-collar workers spending 30 percent of their time working out of the office.
It’s no secret that LinkedIn is a great place to network professionally, post and find jobs, and answer questions and build thought leadership. But if you’re using LinkedIn solely as a place to maintain an online resume, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to reach and engage with potential customers — LinkedIn groups.
HubSpot’s Inbound Lead Generation Manager, Prashant Kaw shares a few of the lessons he’s learned, and three tips for improving your sales and marketing funnel.
1. Conversion starts with marketing and ends with sales. Make sure you are analyzing your entire sales and marketing funnel. It’s not over after you deliver your leads. Make sure those leads are converting to customers.
2. Everything works in cycles. Make sure you track which lead channels lead to the most closed deals. Focus on those channels in your upcoming lead generation campaigns. This is the essence of closed loop marketing!
3. Measure your marketing frequently. If you were an accountant, would you check your balances only at the end of the month? Of course not! The same concept applies when delivering quality leads to your sales force. Meticulously measure your lead programs daily (or even multiple times a day) to ensure your efforts are bringing the best results.
As we are setting up a series of landing pages to roll out a huge SEM and PPC campaign for a couple of our clients, I found the the 9 tips listed here very helpful and thought would share them with our readers:
Your landing page should be neat, easy-to-read and use a lot of white space.
Place call-to-action copy front and center on your landing page.
Provide simple and compelling descriptions of what you do.
Include business information. Don’t be afraid of redundancy on your landing page. Even if you’ve listed your hours of operations, your phone number, your email, a map to your offices and more on your Pay Per Click ad—it is good to reinforce that info here.
Repeat keywords from your ad on your landing page.
Make sure the customer finds what they expected to find. If you feature a special offer or promotion in your ad, be sure to provide easy access to it on your landing page.
Avoid graphic intensive or Flash heavy landing pages. Customers won’t stick around for a slow loading page.
Don’t disable the “browser back” button on your landing page. Doing so will only annoy the user.
Make sure your landing page effectively represents your brand. Use logos and color to highlight your company brand.
Posted an article about “Webinars: Can they help your business grow?” over at our website. Check it out if you’re working towards generating B2B leads for your products or services and have ruled out the idea of hosting webinars (even in India) to:
Gain thought leadership
Branding
Lead generation
Lead incubation.
Designing and executing an effective webinar, however, remains a challenge. We have provided some pointers to design an effective webinar.
Do let us know if you found the article useful in the comments section below!
MaxOffice, an organisation which is focussed on the effective utilization of MS Office products, has announced a series of FREE webinars in association with Microsoft to enhance your productivity.
Dr. Nitin Paranjape and Manmeet Chaudhuri will help you free yourself from the monotony of repetitive office tasks by showing you how to work smart with tools you spend most of your time on - MS Office. Below are the details. help yourself work smart & grow fast!
Webinars are scheduled for every Wednesday from 11:30 hrs to 13:00 hrs IST (UTC +5:30).
April 15, 2009 - Top 10 common mistakes in Excel - Register here
April 22, 2009 - Top 10 things you must know in Word - Register here
April 29, 2009 - Top 10 time and task management methods in Outlook - Register here
May 6, 2009 - 10 ways to create a successful presentation in PowerPoint - Register here
May 13, 2009 - Why you should not manage projects in Excel (instead use MS Project)? - Register here
May 20, 2009 - Top 10 features you must use in MS Project - Register here
May 27, 2009 - Managing multiple projects using Project Server - Register here
